Best apps to use with Pokémon Go: Track steps, find friends, chat trainers, and more!

Pokémon Go is fun all on its own, but with a few extra apps you can really take it to the next level. That includes measuring your exercise, meeting up with people you know, communicating with people nearby, and more!

Pedometer++

So you're trying to hatch an egg and you've got to walk 5 km before it will break out of its shell. But, how far is 5 km? How many steps does that require? Use Pedometer++ and set it to metric to keep track of how far you've walked. You can even set a daily step goal to track how far away you are from reaching your egg-hatching goal. It shows you how many steps you've walked today, plus how many kilometers that is equal to. Incidentally, 5 km is approximately 8,500 steps, so you'd better get moving.

Find my Friends

Do you want to let your buddies know where a hot PokéStop is? Are you planning a Pokémon Gym takeover and want to get a group of friends on your team to help you out? Turn on Find My Friends (and have your fellow Pokémon Go players do the same) and track everyone as they roam around the city. When you get to a hot spot, let your friends know where to meet you using the Notify feature. Let the Poké Party begin!

Yelp

Yelp is a great app for finding nearby restaurants, watering holes, and now PokéStops. The company recently added a "PokéStop Nearby" feature that you can use to help you track down the next hotspot location. All you have to do is search for a type of business, like a restaurant or bar, and scroll through the filter options until you find PokéStop Nearby. Once filtered, you will only see businesses that have a known PokéStop out front. It's a great way to get a Poké Pub Crawl going (Guess what I'm doing this weekend).

Google Maps

Sure, there is a map in Pokémon Go that makes it possible to see where nearby PokéStops and Pokémon Gyms are, but it leaves a lot to be desired. Unless you know the city streets really well, you can get confused trying to figure out where to walk next.

With Google Maps, you can compare the location of PokéStops and Gyms in Pokémon Go with the real world locations. When you've determined where you want to be, drop a pin and get directions so you don't find yourself wandering into a dark alley accidentally.

Poison Maps

Poison Maps is a mapping service specifically designed to show you points of interest (where the POI in Poison comes from). Many PokéStops appear near churches, museums, iconic statues, and tourist spots. Although it doesn't show you all PokéStops or gyms, Poison Maps can definitely point you in the right direction to finding some of the more popular locations.

Lure Squad

Lure Squad is a service that just opened up after the US launch of Pokémon Go. We found out about it on Product Hunt. It is not an actual app, but a way for businesses to connect to consumers.

A business owner can register a PokéStop near their location and offer some kind of reward for anyone that wants to drop a Lure Module, like a free cup of coffee or 10 percent off of a purchase.

Pokémon Go players can look up registered PokéSpots nearby and find out if any businesses are requesting a Lure. Then, they can head to the location, set a Lure, and introduce themselves to business owner as the player who set the Lure (they can check to make sure you are the account holder for the Lure), and thank you with some sort of discount or gratis.

Visit the Lure Squad website from Safari on your iPhone and then set a shortcut to your Home screen.

RazerGo

PC gaming hardware company Razer is getting into the Pokémon Go craze too. They have an upcoming app called RazerGo, which allows players to chat with each other within a specific radius. It uses a sort of geofencing to identify other users within a three, 60, or 600 mile radius. Players can join a public chat, team chat, or have private direct messages with others. The app is scheduled to launch on July 25, but for now you can use the web version.

Poke Radar for Pokemon Go

The Poke Radar is a community based app for finding out where different types of Pokémon spawn in Pokémon Go. Players submit locations where they saw or caught a Pokémon so that others will know where to look. Because it is community based, there are some areas that won't have any information provided. As a player, you can change that by pinning where you were when you caught that Koffing. You can also see who submitted a pin and vote whether that pin was helpful in your search. When you select a Pokémon, you get directions to its location via the Maps app.